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IRA Terrorism. One of the main problems of the present is the global terrorism. Terrorism unfortunately became an integral part of the political and economic processes in the world thus making a threat for the civil and the national security worldwide. There are a lot of discussions on defining the terrorism. Sometimes the acts of the terror are called the revolutionary struggle, sometimes the terrorists are called the rebels, and sometimes they define themselves as the fighters for some high ideals. Nowadays the terrorism became an epidemic that has struck the world and changed completely all our understanding of security.
After the cold war is over and the mankind is supposed to breathe freely being liberated from all those senseless arms races, the confrontation between two super military political blocks was replaced by another one happened to be even more dangerous than the previous one, the confrontation between the civilized mankind and the barbarian terrorism. The most appropriate definition of the terrorists is something like the small armed groups using the threat or violence against the large groups of non-combatants to gain their political aims. The most important is that the thread or the violence is applied against the non-combatants, i. e. peaceful people.
The terror is the prerogative of the weak, those who can not or do not want to gain their political aims by the conventional, accepted by the civilized world means and procedures. Unfortunately the definition of the terrorists is highly dependable upon the political views of this or that politician. The same groups of the armed combatants attacking the civilians are called by the various politicians the terrorists and the freedom fighters, fighters for justice etc. These definitions explain the different attitudes of these or those leaders towards the terrorists, i. e.
the moral aspect of the problem is mixed with the political one, which influences the humanitarian aspect of the problem greatly. The terror war is the war aimed to demolish the human dignity by means of fear. The September attacks on the USA marked the distinctive borderline in the global war with the terrorism. The civilization faced the new threat it happened to be unprepared to. But the terrorism is as old as the civilization itself. If we study the phenomenon of the terrorism we realize that the terrorists do their actions when they feel they have the impunity.
That does not concern the suicidal acts, because in this case the executors of the acts are actually the weapons of the terror rather than the terrorists. We can distinguish some kinds of terror. All of them have some ideological coverage of their aims. The terrorism based on the religious confrontation is the most dangerous due to the fanaticism of such movements. This fanaticism may be explained by the long history of the confrontation. Such confrontation is as old as religion itself.
While speaking of the terrorism based on the religion confrontation we mean the inter confession confrontation, that is Moslems vs. Christians, etc. But one of the first and the cruelest manifestation of the terrorism was the massacre between the Protestants and Catholics in the mid centuries in France. Such confrontation within the same religion, Christianity is the cruelest and it has no chances to stop. It very much resembles the civil wars, very cruel wars within one nation. According to the aims of the terrorism we may distinguish the nationalists terrorists.
These are the groups seeking the self determination. These groups can operate both within the country and outside. They have a certain ideological coverage, the struggle for the independence or something else. While using the terrorists methods they are defined as the terrorists and no ideological coverage can change their criminal nature. Sometimes the nationalists movements have certain religious basis. In this case the minority practicing the religion different from that of the majority are committing their acts using the religion as the ideological basis for their crimes.
The Christian inter confession conflicts have the long history. Such conflicts are very dangerous because the religion is the best ideological basis and the terrorists sometimes are very confident in it. If we speak about, say political confrontation, there is always a chance for the peaceful negotiations, while speaking of the religion based conflicts there is no chance at all. The religion is often is taken as a dogma and the only way to find the mutual understanding is to change the confession of any of the counterparty which is almost impossible. One of the country which became the target of the inter confessional conflict is the Northern Ireland. This country has been suffering from the political war between the Protestants and the Catholics for years.
The originality of this conflict is that there is no other such brutal opposition in the world based on the inter confessional basis within the one religion, namely Christianity. The key participant of this conflict is IRA (Irish Republican Army). The IRA gained its popularity as the terrorist organization characterized by the bloodiest actions against the innocent people and which is responsible for a great number of deaths of the innocent civilians. If we analyze the roots of the conflicts we can mark three sources of it. The first one is traditional suppression of the Catholics by the Protestants. The second is that the government is involved in this conflict assisting one side.
While assisting one side of the conflict government produces the strong opposition from the other side. It is like the physics law that each action causes the counteraction. Once government created its enemies it ignores the problems of the newly created enemies. It is like axiom, the enemies are created by the government and then the government has nothing to negotiate with the enemies. There may be some factors to improve by the government, but instead of improving such factors some governments prefer to ignore them because they are favoring the governments enemies. Then the opposition considers the terror to be the only way to attract the governments attention.
The last factor is that apart from supporting one side of the conflict government sometimes act itself against such groups using the police and the military means which causes the opposition to the regime. All these factors are the background of the conflict in the Northern Ireland and the ideological basis for the IRA 1. The IRA began its activity with the aims different from those it has now. It was founded as the defensive military group for the Catholics in 1866. The objective necessity of its formation was to defend the Catholics against the Protestants in the North Ireland. The Catholics were the minority in Ireland.
The religious motivation was added by the political one in 1921 when Ireland was divided into two countries, The Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland. The religious doctrine was added by the national doctrine and made the conflict even worse. The IRA was fighting for the reunification of The Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland 2. In 1969 the IRA was divided into two branches, the Official IRA with the more socialist principles and the Provisional IRA which has remained unyielding in the nationalist foundation and which was military directed. While using the term IRA in this paper we mean the Provisional IRA. The main statement of the IRA is Ireland had been conquered by force, partitioned by force, and by force would be saved" (Bell, 1997: 458). 3 This dogma made the IRA one of the most dangerous terrorist group in the world being supported by the terrorists formation world wide including the USA.
British government is responsible for its policy for the discrimination of the Catholics. The discrimination gave the IRA formal reasons for their activity. The government tried to divide the Catholics and the Protestants erecting the barricades thus violating the basic human rights. These actions recruited more supporters to IRA.
Instead of depriving the IRA of any formal reason for conducting their military activity the authorities caused more such reasons. The government may be considered in this conflict as some detonating factor for the confrontation. Thus the Catholics associated themselves with the IRA while the Protestants associated themselves with the government and the conflict turned to its logical way, i. e. between the IRA and the government. One of the major reasons of the confrontation is that the government has not yet taken any steps towards the political settlement of the conflict.
It is very difficult to do because the IRA is the terrorist group by definition and it contradicts to the principles of the counterterrorism to negotiate with the terrorists. But maybe there would be a way out if the political questions are separated formally from the questions of the counter terror. There is a paradox regarding the political solution of the problem. The necessity of such solution is obvious. London needs to start the negotiations, but IRA as any other terrorist organization will definitely boycott such possible negotiations. The most important action to stop the conflict is to eliminate the reasons of the conflict.
The terrorists will definitely resist such negotiation because if London grants the Northern Ireland the right of self determination IRA will loose the democratic elections because they have no doctrine except of the terror, the revolutionary war. The possible peaceful initiatives may fail and the conflict will go on according to the Spanish scenario where the Basque separatists are committing the senseless terror acts thus opposing the people to them. If the Spanish scenario accepted London will definitely get the license to kill that will be used as mass police operations against the activists of the IRA. The IRA has strong international connections with the other terrorist organization world wide. This fact puts off the mask of political movement supporting the dignity of the people from the IRA. This fact places the IRA into the group of the global criminal terrorist formation.
Some bombing techniques used by the IRA were identified during the attacks of the PLO in Israel. 4. But the IRA's connections are not limited to the Middle East or the Palestinians. On April 24, 2001, the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations published the findings of its investigation of the IRA activities in Colombia. Their report clearly demonstrated a longstanding connection with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), mentioned at least 15 more IRA terrorists who have been traveling in and out of Colombia since 1998, and estimated that the IRA had received at least $ 2 million in drug proceeds for training members of FARC 5. The IRA as any other global terrorist organization gets their support from the criminal activity, namely the drugs trafficking.
The activists of the IRA as it was stated above have the certain connections with the drug dealers in Colombia 6. It is said the IRA has the strong links to Libya. The IRA is changing its profile from the domestic movement with the more or less formed ideology into the international terrorists movement thus cutting off all the way of possible legal negotiations with London. The negotiations between London and the IRA sometimes come to dead end. Thus London considers the main condition for the negotiation is the disarmament of the IRA, IRA demands to take all the troops from the Northern Ireland. One of the main aims of all the IRA actions is the publicity.
The IRA, using the brutal terrorist methods tries to attract attention of the world community towards its political problems by means of terror. The result of such publicity will be the assuming by the world community that the IRA is a terrorist organization that most likely will break off all the opportunities for the dialogue with London. The IRAs terrorism is very specific and differs from other similar movements. First of all the conflict has a very long history. Secondly, the historically irresponsible position of the authorities instead of softening the conflict all the time encourages it.
The IRA unlike other terrorist movements received from the government rather firm political basis. That of course does not mean that the IRA is not a terrorist movement. The terrorists groups should be defined not by their aims but by the methods they use. It is obvious that the usage of bombs, murders, drugs trafficking put the IRA in one group with Al Qaeda, PLO, Colombian terrorists, and other world wide recognized criminal formations. The accord should be found, but due to the nature of the conflict it is very difficult to imagine the existence of some independent formation on the religion basis. The violence will never be stopped in such country unless the majority is deported or they change their religion.
Both variants are impossible without violation of the human rights. The only way out is to resolve the problem by the political means. London should change their attitude, namely grant equal rights to the representatives of the both communities, and abolish all the differences on the religion basis. These measures will make IRA loose the religious, ideological and the political reasons for their activity. The situation should be resolved radically by the complex of measures and not by the separate actions. The IRA will have nothing to do but stop their terror activity if the outer reasons of the conflicts are eliminated.
There is of course the danger they will be keeping putting new and new requirements, but all the frames of the future agreement should be negotiated preliminary. Another difficult problem is the definition of the participants of the negotiations. The IRA by all means should stop their activity during the negotiations. Such step is a little bit contradictory according to the principles of dealing with the terrorists, but the negotiations are supposed to be done not with the IRA. If the political party, though being the political branch of IRA comes to the talks, the formal standards of the negotiations are provided. Another crucial point is the general problem of the human rights in the North Ireland.
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission was established under Good Friday Agreement 7. The IRA is no doubt the terrorist organization no matter what political aims it has. The activity of the IRA is criminal and can not be accepted by the world community. Due to the inadequate attitude of the official London to the Northern Ireland minority it should be resolved with the participation of the international organizations, say UNO or EU. The role of the EU became very important due to its measures against the global terrorism. The IRA should either stop its activity with the start of the negotiations or be prosecuted under the laws for the terrorism.
Bibliography: The Justification of Terrorism by Jane Manning. Nationalreviewonline IRA + PLO = Terror by Rachel Ehrenfeld The Irish Times. Citation The Justification of Terrorism by Jane Manning, available at web Ibid Ibid Nationalreviewonline IRA + PLO = Terror by Rachel Ehrenfeld available at web Ibid US hearings to inquire into links between IRA, Colombian guerrillas, The Irish Times, available at web The Justification of Terrorism by Jane Manning, available at web
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